Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production - download pdf or read online

By Jason Puskar

ISBN-10: 0804775354

ISBN-13: 9780804775359

This ebook argues that language and literature actively produced likelihood within the past due 19th and early 20th centuries by means of categorizing accidents and losses as blameless of layout. vehicle collisions and occupational accidents turned "car injuries" and "industrial accidents." in the course of the post-Civil warfare interval of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, probability used to be an summary enemy opposed to which society could unite. by means of generating likelihood, novels by means of William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine eco-friendly, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped determine new modes of collective interdependence. likelihood here's attached now not with the aggressive individualism of the Gilded Age, yet with vital revolutionary and social democratic reforms, together with advancements in coverage, which had lengthy hired coincidence narratives to form its personal "mutual society." Accident Society finds the level to which American collectivity has depended—and maintains to depend—on the literary construction of chance.

Among the Civil conflict and the 1st global warfare, realism used to be the main well-known type of American fiction. Realist writers of the interval comprise a few of America's maximum, equivalent to Henry James, Edith Wharton and Mark Twain, but in addition many lesser-known writers whose paintings nonetheless speaks to us this day, for example Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala-Ša and Sarah Orne Jewett.

Henry James defied posterity to disturb his bones: he used to be adamant that his legacy be dependent solely on his courses and that his deepest lifestyles and writings stay eternally deepest. regardless of this, shortly after his dying in 1916 an extreme fight all started between his kin and his literary disciples to manage his posthumous acceptance, a fight that was once endured through later generations of critics and biographers.

Additional resources for Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

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In Indian Summer (1886), a middle-aged lover falls from a cliff when a horse rears. The most brutal accidents occur during Howells’s political phase in the late 1880s. ”7 Just two years later, in The Shadow of a Dream (1890), Howells repeated Peck’s accident with a different minister, James Nevil. While saying good-bye to Basil March, Nevil steps down from the train just as it starts to move and is promptly crushed between the Pullman car and an archway. 8 Between the publication of Annie Kilburn and The Shadow of a Dream, and so bookended by the accidental railroad deaths of these two ministers, Howells published A Hazard of New Fortunes, his most sustained inquiry into the place of chance and accident in modern life.

When we ask what caused the man’s death, different social, political, and institutional frames of reference yield equally valid answers: “A medical man may say that the cause of his death was suffocation by water entering the lungs. ”37 Green’s skepticism undermined two traditional instruments of reason, necessity and causation, which in Green’s view were value-laden constructions masquerading as actual facts. But it was Dewey who finally turned this strain of skepticism against chance itself. 38 Causes and effects may seem to hang together naturally and necessarily, but for all we know things may work differently tomorrow, or in another part of the world, or for some other reason altogether.

Peirce even insisted that what seem to be scientific laws are merely habits of nature, equivalent to habitual ways of thinking but actually resident in the material world. Most other pragmatists tended to think of law and necessity as habits of thought, ossified into incontrovertible statements. In the case of legal pragmatists such as Nicholas St. 36 He used the case of a drowned man as an example. When we ask what caused the man’s death, different social, political, and institutional frames of reference yield equally valid answers: “A medical man may say that the cause of his death was suffocation by water entering the lungs.